Gunpowder Plots: Sexuality and Censorship in Woolf’s Later Works

Abstract

When Woolf first conceived of a sequel to A Room of One’s Own in 1931, she imagined this new work would address “the sexual life of women” (D4 6), a subject that struck her as possessing incendiary potential: “I’m quivering and itching to write my—whats it to be called?—‘Men are like that?’—no that’s too patently feminist: the sequel then, for which I have collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls” (D4 77). Yet the various texts that arguably emerged from Woolf’s engagement with “the sexual life of women”—“Professions for Women,” The Pargiters (abandoned and published posthumously), The Years, and Three Guineas—play down or subordinate women’s relationship to their corporeality. Instead, in these texts Woolf shifts her focus to the ways in which the middle-class woman’s acculturation teaches her to censor her physicality, a censorship that typically results not only in female silence about physical experience, but in an atrophied or attenuated relationship to physicality altogether.